‘It deals with my own blood, my inheritance’: Asia Argento on historical trauma in Death Has No Master

‘I drove myself pretty much insane’ … Asia Argento in Death Has No Master. Photograph: La Faena

In Death Has No Master, Asia Argento stars as an anxious foreigner in Venezuela. Her character, Caro, is on a harried mission to reclaim inherited property from the local caretakers who still reside there. That’s the setup in a surrealist psychological thriller, in which Venezuelan-Canadian film-maker Jorge Thielen Armand unpacks personal history alongside deep-rooted and “eternal” tensions that still affect the country today.

“The film has multiple layers of meaning,” says Armand, ahead of the film’s premiere in the director’s fortnight section at Cannes. “Recent events only make those multitudes greater.”